David Foster Wallace

About David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1962. His family were middle-class intellectuals: his father was a philosophy professor; his mother, an English teacher. Both of them read widely.

They moved to Illinois when he was young. Wallace played tennis and was regionally ranked. Although he stopped playing Tennis in High School, it would continue to fascinate him (and become the source of handful of his essays, such as “Federer as Religious Experience”).

He went to Amherst college in Massachusetts, picked up his calling as a writer, and wrote his first novel as a senior, The Broom in the System. He said in an interview that it was Donald Barthelme’s short story “The Balloon” that made him want to write.

And although he was a product of the American postmodern tradition, he also wanted to supersede it, because he felt that it lacked emotions and feeling and its ironic mode had been co-opted by consumerist culture.

David Foster Wallace is best known for his 1,ooo+-page novel Infinite Jest. It was an epic exploration of American anxiety, depression, addiction, and beauty.

He wrote essays and short stories too, all wrought with the same kind of hyper-attentiveness, grammatical integrity, and breathtaking rhythm that is stamped into every sentence DFW wrote.

He killed himself in 2008, after a life-long struggle with depression.